The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

by Tom Wolfe

  OTHER PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING TO SHOW UP AT KESEY’S, AND that was part of the trouble. Some of the Perry Lane crowd didn’t know exactly what to make of Cassady. Here he is before us in Kesey’s Versailles, coming on, coming on, with his shirt off and his arms jerking and his abdominal obliques jutting out at the sides like a weight lifter’s … We are hip, we value the holy primitive. Only Kesey is intimating that one should learn from Cassady, he is talking to you. Which he was. Cassady wanted intellectual communion. But the intellectuals just wanted him to be the holy primitive, the Denver kid, the natural in our midst. Sometimes Cassady would sense they weren’t accepting him intellectually and go off into the corner, still on his manic monologue, muttering, “All right, I’ll take my own trip, I’ll go off on my own trip, this is my own trip, you understand …”

  Or Page Browning. The Cadaverous Cowboy had found his way over the mountain, too. Back on Perry Lane he had been just a Low Rent character popping in from time to time on his route. Only now Kesey is intimating that one can learn from Page Browning. Kesey finds something loyal, brave and creative, creative, under that cadaverous face and the Adam’s apple and the black motorcycle jacket like a leftover from when he must’ve ridden with the Hell’s Angels—and his thick Shellube pit voice. The primordial Shellube pits … could that be it, a little class fear, after all, among the hip … genteel … intellectuals? A little Ahor, as Arthur Koestler called it, the Ancient Horror, from boyhood—the genteel suburban kid rides his bicycle over to the gas station and there in the grease pit area where they lubricate the cars the hard rocks are hunkered down telling jokes about pussy, with an occasional clinical reference to bowel movements and crepitation. And oh christ don’t you remember their forearms with the basilic veins wrapped around them like surgical tubes, gorged with the unattainable lower-class hard-rock power that any moment is going to look up and spot us … genteel little pudding kids. But Kesey loved this Low Rent stuff. He was ready to swing with it. In time he would even be swinging with the beasts from the veritable Ahor fathoms of the Shellube pits, the Hell’s Angels themselves …

  In fact, only a few of the new retinue that showed up at La Honda were Low Rent in terms of background, but the place became much more down-home than Perry Lane.

  One of Kesey’s old friends, Kenneth Babbs, showed up, just back from Vietnam, where he had been a captain in the Marines, flying helicopters. Babbs had graduated magna cum laude from Miami University, majoring in English. He had also been a great athlete. He entered the creative-writing program at Stanford, where Kesey met him. Babbs was tall, powerful, a very Rabelaisian creature. Back from the wars, he came on like a great hearty grizzly bear roaring a cosmic laugh. Sometimes he would wear a flight suit for days at a time, no matter where he was, come fly with me. And Babbs was capable of some wild flights. He gave the Kesey colony much of its new style … Yes. He introduced the idea of the pranks, great public put-ons they could perform …

  And Mike Hagen arrived. Hagen was a fellow Kesey had known in Oregon, good-looking, soft-spoken, well-mannered, from a good family, fairly rich, the kind of kid daddies smile over as he takes their teenage daughter out on her first date, Yup, I’ve raised her pretty damn well, if I do say so. No riffraff for my girl, just nice Christian boys who say Yes, sir, Yes, ma’am and comb their hair down with water on the comb. About ten minutes after Hagen pulled into Kesey’s, he had his Screw Shack built out back of the cabin, a lean-to banged together with old boards and decorated inside with carpet remnants, a mattress with an India-print coverlet, candles, sparkling little bijoux, a hi-fi speaker—for the delight and comfort of Hagen’s Girls. Oh christ Hagen’s Girls and the trouble they caused—Stark Naked, Anonymous—but they come later. Hagen was a benign but inspired con man in a sweet way. He had a special gift for haggling, bartering, hassling, and Hagen would turn up with his car crammed with gleaming tape-recorder equipment, movie equipment, microphones, speakers, amplifiers, even video-tape equipment, and the audio-visual level started rising around here—

  Then one day, for example, one of Kesey’s old Perry Lane friends, Gurney Norman, a writer, drove up for the weekend from Fort Ord, the Army camp, and brought along one of his Army friends, a 24-year-old first lieutenant in the infantry named Ron Bevirt. Bevirt put everybody off at first, because he looked totally Army. He was fat and sloppy-looking and had a particularly gross-looking Army crewcut and was totally unsophisticated. Bevirt, however, liked them and he kept coming on weekends and bringing a lot of food, which he enjoyed sharing with everybody, and he smiled and laughed a lot and people couldn’t help but get to like him. By and by he was out of the Army and he came around all the time. He even started getting leaner and harder and his hair grew out until it was like Prince Valiant’s, in the comic strip, and he was a pretty handsome guy and very much into the … pudding. By and by he became known as The Hassler and his real name vanished almost …

  AND BY AND BY, OF COURSE, THE CITIZENS OF LA HONDA AND others would start wondering … what are the ninnies doing? How to tell it? But there was no way to tell them about the experience . You couldn’t put it into words. The citizens always had the same fantasy, known as the pathology fantasy. These ninnies are pathological. Sometimes it was psychological—what do these kids come from, broken homes or what? Sometimes it was social—are these kids alienated? is our society getting rotten at the core? or what? The citizens couldn’t know about the LSD experience, because that door had never opened for them. To be on the threshold of—Christ! how to tell them about the life here? The Youth had always had only three options: go to school, get a job or live at home. And—how boring each was!—compared to the experience of … the infinite … and a life in which the subject is not scholastic or bureaucratic but … Me and Us, the attuned ones amid the non-musical shiny-black-shoe multitudes, I—with my eyes on that almost invisible hole up there in the r-r-r-redwood sky …

  ONE NIGHT BOB STONE WAS SITTING AT HOME IN MENLO Park—he was still in the creative-writing program at Stanford—and the phone rang and it was Babbs calling from Kesey’s in La Honda. Come on over, he said, we’re going to get something going. Well, no, Stone said, he didn’t feel much up to it, he was kind of tired and it would take an hour to drive over the mountain and an hour to drive back, and maybe some other time—

  “Come on, Bob,” says Babbs. “It won’t take you an hour. You can get here in thirty minutes.”

  Babbs is in very high spirits and in the background Stone can hear music and voices and they are, indeed, getting something going.

  “I know how long it takes,” says Stone. “And it takes forty-five minutes or an hour, more like an hour at night.”

  “Listen!” says Babbs, who is laughing and practically shouting into the phone. “The intrepid traveler can make it in thirty minutes! The intrepid traveler can make it with the speed of light!”

  In the background Babbs can hear a couple of voices rapping off that: “The intrepid traveler! The intrepid traveler!”

  “The intrepid traveler,” Babbs is shouting. “The intrepid traveler just gets up and walks out and he’s here!”

  And so on, until Stone’s resistance wears down and he gets in his car and heads over. He arrives; after an hour, yes.

  As soon as he gets out of his car out front of the house he starts hearing the Big Rap, from inside the house, from up in the woods, it’s like drums are beating and horns are blowing and Pranksters are ululating and rapping: “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  He goes through the French doors in the front, mad ochre and lurid lights, gongs, pipes, drums, guitars being banged like percussion bangers—

  “The Intrepid Traveler!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—the traveler in a flash!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—straights out the curves!”
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  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—curves out the straights!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—a beam of light!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—a lightning beam!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—shortens the circuit!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—short-waves the band!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler—”

  “—and his band of Merry Pranksters!”

  “The Intrepid Traveler!—”

  —and his band of Merry Pranksters take a journey to the East.

  chapter VI

  The Bus

  I COULDN’T TELL YOU FOR SURE WHICH OF THE MERRY Pranksters got the idea for the bus, but it had the Babbs touch. It was a superprank, in any case. The original fantasy, here in the spring of 1964, had been that Kesey and four or five others would get a station wagon and drive to New York for the New York World’s Fair. On the way they could shoot some film, make some tape, freak out on the Fair and see what happened. They would also be on hand, in New York, for the publication of Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, early in July. So went the original fantasy.

  Then somebody—Babbs?—saw a classified ad for a 1939 International Harvester school bus. The bus belonged to a man in Menlo Park. He had a big house and a lot of grounds and a nice set of tweeds and flannels and eleven children. He had rigged out the bus for the children. It had bunks and benches and a refrigerator and a sink for washing dishes and cabinets and shelves and a lot of other nice features for living on the road. Kesey bought it for $1,500-in the name of Intrepid Trips, Inc.

  Kesey gave the word and the Pranksters set upon it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up the top of the bus so you could sit up there in the open air and play music, even a set of drums and electric guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride. Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of.

  The painting job, meanwhile, with everybody pitching in in a frenzy of primary colors, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, was sloppy as hell, except for the parts Roy Seburn did, which were nice manic mandalas. Well, it was sloppy, but one thing you had to say for it; it was freaking lurid. The manifest, the destination sign in the front, read: “Furthur,” with two u’s.

  THEY TOOK A TEST RUN UP INTO NORTHERN CALIFORNIA AND right away this wild-looking thing with the wild-looking people was great for stirring up consternation and vague befuddling resentment among the citizens. The Pranksters were now out among them, and it was exhilarating—look at the mothers staring!—and there was going to be holy terror in the land. But there would also be people who would look up out of their poor work-a-daddy lives in some town, some old guy, somebody’s stenographer, and see this bus and register … delight, or just pure open-invitation wonder. Either way, the Intrepid Travelers figured, there was hope for these people. They weren’t totally turned off. The bus also had great possibilities for altering the usual order of things. For example, there were the cops.

  One afternoon the Pranksters were on a test run in the bus going through the woods up north and a forest fire had started. There was smoke beginning to pour out of the woods and everything. Everybody on the bus had taken acid and they were zonked. The acid was in some orange juice in the refrigerator and you drank a paper cup full of it and you were zonked. Cassady was driving and barreling through the burning woods wrenching the steering wheel this way and that way to his inner-wired beat, with a siren wailing and sailing through the rhythm.

  A siren? It’s a highway patrolman, which immediately seems like the funniest thing in the history of the world. Smoke is pouring out of the woods and they are all sailing through leaf explosions in the sky, but the cop is bugged about this freaking bus. The cop yanks the bus over to the side and he starts going through a kind of traffic-safety inspection of the big gross bus, while more and more of the smoke is billowing out of the woods. Man, the license plate is on wrong and there’s no light over the license plate and this turn signal looks bad and how about the brakes, let’s see that hand brake there. Cassady, the driver, is already into a long monologue for the guy, only he is throwing in all kinds of sirs: “Well, yes sir, this is a Hammond bi-valve serrated brake, you understand, sir, had it put on in a truck ro-de-o in Springfield, Oregon, had to back through a slalom course of baby’s bottles and yellow nappies, in the existential culmination of Oregon, lots of outhouse freaks up there, you understand, sir, a punctual sort of a state, sir, yes sir, holds to 28,000 pounds, 28,000 pounds, you just look right here, sir, tested by a pure-blooded Shell Station attendant in Springfield, Oregon, winter of ’62, his gumball boots never froze, you understand, sir, 28,000 pounds hold, right here—” Whereupon he yanks back on the hand-brake as if it’s attached to something, which it isn’t, it is just dangling there, and jams his foot on the regular brake, and the bus shudders as if the hand brake has a hell of a bite, but the cop is thoroughly befuddled now, anyway, because Cassady’s monologue has confused him, for one thing, and what the hell are these … people doing. By this time everybody is off the bus rolling in the brown grass by the shoulder, laughing, giggling, yahooing, zonked to the skies on acid, because, mon, the woods are burning, the whole world is on fire, and a Cassady monologue on automotive safety is rising up from out of his throat like weenie smoke, as if the great god Speed were frying in his innards, and the cop, representative of the people of California in this total freaking situation, is all hung up on a hand brake that doesn’t exist in the first place. And the cop, all he can see is a bunch of crazies in screaming orange and green costumes, masks, boys and girls, men and women, twelve or fourteen of them, lying in the grass and making hideously crazy sounds—christ almighty, why the hell does he have to contend with … So he wheels around and says, “What are you, uh—show people?”

  “That’s right, officer,” Kesey says. “We’re show people. It’s been a long row to hoe, I can tell you, and it’s gonna be a long row to hoe, but that’s the business.”

  “Well,” says the cop, “you fix up those things and …” He starts backing off toward his car, cutting one last look at the crazies. “ … And watch it next time …” And he guns on off.

  That was it! How can you give a traffic ticket to a bunch of people rolling in the brown grass wearing Day-Glo masks, practically Greek masques, only with Rat phosphorescent élan, giggling, keening in their costumes and private world while the god Speed sizzles like a short-order French fry in the gut of some guy who doesn’t even stop talking to breathe. A traffic ticket? The Pranksters felt more immune than ever. There was no more reason for them to remain in isolation while the ovoid eyes of La Honda supurated. They could go through the face of America muddling people’s minds, but it’s a momentary high, and the bus would be gone, and all the Fab foam in their heads would settle back down into their brain pans.

  SO THE HIERONYMUS BOSCH BUS HEADED OUT OF KESEY’S place with the destination sign in front reading “Furthur” and a sign in the back saying “Caution: Weird Load.” It was weird, all right, but it was euphoria on
board, barreling through all that warm California sun in July, on the road, and everything they had been working on at Kesey’s was on board and heading on Furthur. Besides, the joints were going around, and it was nice and high out here on the road in America. As they headed out, Cassady was at the wheel, and there was Kesey, Babbs, Page Browning, George Walker, Sandy, Jane Burton, Mike Hagen, Hassler, Kesey’s brother Chuck and his cousin Dale, a guy known as Brother John, and three newcomers who were just along for the ride or just wanted to go to New York.

  One of them was a young, quite handsome kid—looked sort of like the early, thin Michael Caine in Zulu—named Steve Lambrecht. He was the brother-in-law of Kesey’s lawyer, Paul Robertson, and he was just riding to New York to see a girl he knew named Kathy. Another was a girl named Paula Sundsten. She was young, plump, ebullient, and very sexy. Kesey knew her from Oregon. Another one was some girl Hagen of the Screw Shack had picked up in San Francisco, on North Beach. She was the opposite of Paula Sundsten. She was thin, had long dark hair, and would be moody and silent one minute and nervous and carrying on the next. She was good-looking like a TV witch.

  By the time they hit San Jose, barely 30 miles down the road, a lot of the atmosphere of the trip was already established. It was nighttime and many souls were high and the bus had broken down. They pulled into a service station and pretty soon one of the help has his nose down in under the hood looking at the engine while Cassady races the motor and the fluorescent stanchion lights around the station hit the bus in weird phosphorescent splashes, the car lights stream by on the highway, Cassady guns the engine some more, and from out of the bus comes a lot of weird wailing, over the speakers or just out the windows. Paula Sundsten has gotten hold of a microphone with the variable-lag setup and has found out she can make weird radio-spook laughing ghoul sounds with it, wailing like a banshee and screaming “How was your stay-ay-ay-ay … in San Ho-zay-ay-ay-ay-ay,” with the variable lag picking up the ay-ay-ay-ays and doubling them, quadrupling them, octupling them. An endless ricocheting echo—and all the while this weird, slightly hysterical laugh and a desperate little plunking mandolin sail through it all, coming from Hagen’s girl friend, who is lying back on a bench inside, plunking a mandolin and laughing—in what way …